They lay on the grass and gazed with stupefaction upon the large, artificially twisted horns of the oxen, the sheep clothed with skins to protect their wool, the furrows crossing one another so as to form lozenges, and the ploughshares like ships' anchors, with the pomegranate trees that were watered with silphium.
"Salammbo"
Gustave Flaubert
The reserve of silphium must be sold, and the trading towns taxed; the Mercenaries would grow impatient; Tunis was already with them; and the rich, stunned by Hanno's ragings and his colleague's reproaches, urged any citizens who might know a Barbarian to go to see him immediately in order to win back his friendship, and to speak him fair.
"Salammbo"
Gustave Flaubert
silphium, a famous medicinal plant of Lybia and of Persia, seems to have disappeared entirely.
"The Earth as Modified by Human Action"
George P. Marsh